Our Technological Future: July 2007

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Colossal Magnetic Levitation Wind Turbine Proposed

(click to enlarge)

It's a vision of a magnetically levitated wind turbine that can generate one gigawatt of energy (enough to power 750,000 homes). This is the device proposed by a new Arizona-based company, MagLev Wind Turbine Technologies. The company claims that it can deliver clean power for less than cent per kilowatt hour using this wind turbine.

That's a pretty big deal actually. Today's energy is 10-15 cents per kilowatt.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Solar Energy Hits New 42.8% Efficiency Record

Team sets solar cell record

Using a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform, a consortium led by the University of Delaware has achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8 percent from sunlight at standard terrestrial conditions.

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The consortium’s goal is to create solar cells that operate at 50 percent in production, Barnett said. With the fresh funding and cooperative efforts of the DuPont-UD consortium, he said it is expected new high efficiency solar cells could be in production by 2010.

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“This is a solar cell that works,” Barnett said, adding, “This technology has the potential to change the way electricity is generated throughout the world.”

Barnett believes the 50 percent efficiency mark is just the beginning. “Our best inventions are in front of us,” he said. “The consortium has been a super team, and has worked to develop new devices and architectures based on a breakthrough design paradigm.”

Also see Researchers develop inexpensive, easy process to produce solar panels.

Monday, July 23, 2007

The Future of Mind Control

I have here two movie clips that demonstrate the current state of affairs in the whacky world of mind control.

The first one shows a monkey moving a mechanical arm by thought.

The second one shows a guy lifting boxes in a virtual world, just by thinking about it.

The technology holds great promise for disabled people.

Even though this technology is being developed with disabled people as the major motive, they won't be the only ones that end up using the technology.

Imagine a day where people interact with their computer. By the time the technology hits the mainstream (at least a decade from now), computers will be small enough to be practically invisible.

We will have smoothly hooked up the Internet to our brains... or our brains to the Internet. It all depends on how you wanna look at it.

It might seem harmless enough, but in fact it is the beginning of our transcendance to something bigger.